Sublime

out of raw self-interest; the racist policies necessitate racist ideas to justify them—lingers over the life of racism.

Racial-group behavior is a figment of the racist’s imagination. Individual behaviors can shape the success of individuals. But policies determine the success of groups.

In each of my five test cases, we fall into an error I’ll describe in the first chapter: of supposing that at the core of each identity there is some deep similarity that binds people of that identity together. Not true, I say; not true over and over again.

in what James calls a ‘pluralistic universe’ we should be seeing where and when essentialism works for us and where and when it is unduly limiting. We would not be assuming whether essentialism or anti-essentialism was to be preferred, but rather adding them to our repertoire of useful descriptions. We might take these – the essentialist and the

So I do not pity my seven-year-old self for identifying racially as Black. I still identify as Black. Not because I believe Blackness, or race, is a meaningful scientific category but because our societies, our policies, our ideas, our histories, and our cultures have rendered race and made it matter. I am among those who have been degraded by

The American Negro cannot explain to the African what surely seems in himself to be a want of manliness, of racial pride, a maudlin ability to forgive. It is difficult to make clear that he is not seeking to forfeit his birthright as a black man, but that, on the contrary, it is precisely this birthright which he is struggling to recognize and make

The racializing serves the core mandate of race: to create hierarchies of value.